Why is working *less* a vision of utopia?

[rousseau]

Over the past few months I've read a few quotes and discussions about people who predicted that technology will eventually become so advanced that people won't *have* to work. We could feasibly have very short work weeks, if not, not work at all, and have technology take care of the hard stuff. Years ago I would have thought that this was a reasonable goal, but these days I'm not so sure, at least to a degree.

To put it simply, it comes back to the old saying: happiness comes from something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for. When you look at people as a biological system we're energy consumers who ideally need to expend as much energy as we intake. So in our natural state we have to do things, we have to do energetic work, whether that work is obligatory or not. And so it would seem that eliminating the need for things to do is actually counter-productive to our natural state.

Take the idea to the extreme and imagine that no one at all worked. Just think about how much free time we would have to spend, and how much time we'd have to spend doing pointless things just to move around a bit.

And so I think the reality of a happy, or happier life, happens when people find a good balance between work and free time, not have nothing but free time.

 

[PyramidHead]

Another old saying goes, work is when you don't like what you're doing. I guess if we had a utopia where everything was provided for everybody, people could still do things they used to get paid for. They just wouldn't have to.

I agree with your idea that we are hardwired to be restless. If nobody had to work for money, we'd spend more time working on creative pursuits, personal projects, and recreation; those things expend energy too.

 

[untermensche]

These are pipe dreams unless we come up with an energy source beyond oil to run the show with.

 

[ksen]

How are you defining "work"?

 

[Warpoet]

How are you defining "work"?

If it's something you wouldn't do unless someone paid you for it, I consider it work.

Yes, it's important to keep yourself busy, but I'd much rather keep busy doing something I enjoy and not something I do just because I have bills to pay. I imagine most people feel the same way.

 

[ksen]

How are you defining "work"?

If it's something you wouldn't do unless someone paid you for it, I consider it work.

Yes, it's important to keep yourself busy, but I'd much rather keep busy doing something I enjoy and not something I do just because I have bills to pay. I imagine most people feel the same way.

I think most people would agree with that definition. Therefore the OP makes no sense to me because no one that I've read or communicated with believes that not doing the latter would be Utopia. It's not having to do the former that is considered a potential Utopia.

Me having to sell my limited amount of time on this earth in order to be able to access food, housing, medicine, and most of life's niceties isn't my idea of a necessarily good thing.

 

[coloradoatheist]

I know it's definitely something that people would like to think about doing but even a lot of people become bored in retirement. However we still run into the problem of scrace resources and how to access those resources. People would want to travel but then who works to make that happen? Or name any other activity people would like to do, it requires resources to make it happen.

 

[rousseau]

If it's something you wouldn't do unless someone paid you for it, I consider it work.

Yes, it's important to keep yourself busy, but I'd much rather keep busy doing something I enjoy and not something I do just because I have bills to pay. I imagine most people feel the same way.

I think most people would agree with that definition. Therefore the OP makes no sense to me because no one that I've read or communicated with believes that not doing the latter would be Utopia. It's not having to do the former that is considered a potential Utopia.

Me having to sell my limited amount of time on this earth in order to be able to access food, housing, medicine, and most of life's niceties isn't my idea of a necessarily good thing.

The idea is that *doing work* is a normal and natural part of being human. Even if people view doing no work as a utopia, maybe it's not the utopia that they imagine.

 

[ksen]

I think most people would agree with that definition. Therefore the OP makes no sense to me because no one that I've read or communicated with believes that not doing the latter would be Utopia. It's not having to do the former that is considered a potential Utopia.

Me having to sell my limited amount of time on this earth in order to be able to access food, housing, medicine, and most of life's niceties isn't my idea of a necessarily good thing.

The idea is that *doing work* is a normal and natural part of being human. Even if people view doing no work as a utopia, maybe it's not the utopia that they imagine.

Sure, but no one is arguing to have no work whatsoever. At least no work in the sense WarPoet explained.

What people do argue for is that as technology advances the fruits of that advancement should be distributed enough so that everyone is able to have more leisure time which doesn't mean sitting around playing Playstation all day. It means they have more time to pursue their own interests. That's still work.

 

[dystopian]

The idea is that *doing work* is a normal and natural part of being human.

Says who? It's normal and natural for humans to *not* work for quite a long time as we're growing up. The only reason we become required to do 'work' later on in life is because the necessary work is no longer being done *for* us; not because work is somehow innate to our existence.

If people feel the need to keep themselves busy in a world where they are not required to work in order to live and get luxuries, then they will find ways to keep themselves busy. Why would the ways those hypothetical future people keep themselves busy in somehow be more pointless than most of the shit people get paid to do today? I rather think there'd be a lot more of a point and a lot more satisfaction to be had in the things people would find to keep themselves busy with as opposed to (most) of the things we do to make money.

 

[rousseau]

The idea is that *doing work* is a normal and natural part of being human.

Says who? It's normal and natural for humans to *not* work for quite a long time as we're growing up. The only reason we become required to do 'work' later on in life is because the necessary work is no longer being done *for* us; not because work is somehow innate to our existence.

If people feel the need to keep themselves busy in a world where they are not required to work in order to live and get luxuries, then they will find ways to keep themselves busy. Why would the ways those hypothetical future people keep themselves busy in somehow be more pointless than most of the shit people get paid to do today? I rather think there'd be a lot more of a point and a lot more satisfaction to be had in the things people would find to keep themselves busy with as opposed to (most) of the things we do to make money.

Doing work as in expending energy, with the gist being that the necessity of expending energy to stay alive is how we've evolved. Every animal in the history of earth has had to do meaningful work to stay alive. (school kids are still working in that sense)

I'll give you if we had to do *less* work, and *easier* work we'd probably be happier, but I don't see why *doing no obligatory work* should be a goal. There's only so many times you can walk through a park and play catch.

 

[ksen]

Why should we endeavor to continue to live like cavemen scraping away every day for the necessities to survive? Especially if we live in an era where technology is able to do most of the grunt work?

There is nothing noble in having to toil the day away.

 

[rousseau]

Why should we endeavor to continue to live like cavemen scraping away every day for the necessities to survive? Especially if we live in an era where technology is able to do most of the grunt work?

There is nothing noble in having to toil the day away.

What I'm suggesting is that this might actually make people happier than doing nothing at all, which might be the case because that's how we've evolved.

- Working allows us to find balance between energy intake and output: it gives us a consistent outlet for our energies
- Working can give us psychological benefits
- We have the satisfaction of achieving things
- We have the satisfaction of professional growth throughout our life
- We are mentally challenged to learn new skills and be great at them
- Working allows us to accumulate wealth and life security
- Working allows us to meet people and take a greater part in society

A few years ago I had a friend who had been on disability for two years. For that entire time she had no job, didn't go to school, and had limited funds. She was extremely unhappy and is much happier now that she's back in school accomplishing things.

 

[Toni]

People need to feel purpose in life, or at least most of us do. For a lot of people, they can find enough purpose, enough to engage them intellectually, creatively, socially outside of their 'work.' That would be me. But I have plenty of coworkers who have no idea what they will do with their time, with themselves without the structure of a job.

 

[ksen]

What I'm suggesting is that this might actually make people happier than doing nothing at all, which might be the case because that's how we've evolved.

Nobody is arguing that doing "nothing at all" would be Utopia.

 

[Samhain]

What I'm suggesting is that this might actually make people happier than doing nothing at all, which might be the case because that's how we've evolved.

Nobody is arguing that doing "nothing at all" would be Utopia.

Right, the point is that most of us want to do things that we find gratifying, not working to increase some stock price so that some of the richest people in the world get richer off of our labor.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Why is working *less* a vision of utopia?

Because most people feel they work too hard. It's not having to work, not no work at all.

 

[Emily Lake]

Take the idea to the extreme and imagine that no one at all worked.

I believe that Disney already made that movie:

 

[Bronzeage]

What I'm suggesting is that this might actually make people happier than doing nothing at all, which might be the case because that's how we've evolved.

Nobody is arguing that doing "nothing at all" would be Utopia.

I have a lot to do, but work keeps interfering.

 

[bilby]

I get paid to provide software support. I don't enjoy it much - and I don't hate it much (or at least, not often).

In my spare time, I brew beer.

I pay quite a lot for equipment and ingredients for brewing. There is lots of brewing equipment I would like, but can't afford; So if I want that stuff, I have to raise money for it. I can do this by working as a support engineer; I am debarred by law from even attempting to do this by selling beer - which is a shame, because I could make about $4 a litre of pure profit if I sold my beer for half what the local bottle-shop sells similar beer for.

Of course, I could apply for a license; but then I would need a much larger scale operation to cover the cost of the license, and the excise duty charged on the finished product. I don't want a larger scale operation; I don't want to employ staff, and find distributors and do all the other crap that small businesses do. I want to brew beer, in small lots, and perhaps sell some of what I make to my friends to cover some of my costs.

I could get a job at a microbrewery - or even at a big brewery (there are two in town); but I wouldn't be doing what I want to do, which is experimenting with recipes, and producing nice beer for parties, on my own terms, and to my own timetable.

If I didn't have to work for an income - let's imagine I won the lottery, and have invested the winnings; and the capital is just sufficient to give me the same disposable income I have today, indefinitely - I would spend a lot more time brewing beer, and a lot less time staring at a computer screen. I would also spend a lot of time working on making my home nicer, doing odd repairs and improvements, keeping the yard neat, planting some nice vegetables and maybe a fruit tree or two; I might even have a go at growing some barley, and malting it myself. It would be fun.

I can't do these things, because I don't have the time, after spending 40 hours+ a week at work; and because I can't get the time without losing the money that makes these things possible.

If machines could do all the work, and the money they make by producing and selling the stuff we need could be distributed such that none of us need to work in order to get the income we need to live as I just described, then I would see that as a very significant improvement, if not necessarily utopia.

Sadly, when machines do the work, instead of everyone getting enough to live that way (covering our basic needs plus a few hobbies), a handful of people who happen to own the machines get enough income to buy private jets, multiple mansions, mega yachts, and all that crap, while still earning faster than they can spend. While the rest of us get laid off, and reduced to living off food stamps and unemployment insurance. I can't maintain my hobby on that level of income, and if I tried to spend my time on my hobbies in those circumstances, I would be lambasted as a moocher, and told I must spend all that new 'free' time looking for a job.